The present invention relates to the art of file folders and, more particularly, to file folders for storing multiple documents in a manner that the presence or absence of documents is readily apparent.
In many industrial and/or business environments, a prescribed set of documents will be involved in a given transaction or series of transactions. For example, in the home mortgage industry, a likely series of documents would be a mortgage application, credit report, buyers' affidavit, sellers' affidavit, mortgage, mortgage note, deed and settlement sheet.
In such situations as the business transaction proceeds, i.e. in the case of a home mortgage, it is necessary to continuously review the transaction file to be sure of the presence or absence of such documents and to update the documents. The absence of a necessary document obviously could have a serious delaying effect upon completion of the transaction until the appropriate document is procured.
The most conventional way in which such documents are filed is that they simply are placed in bulk in a given file. Under such circumstances, the presence or absence of given documents can only be ascertained by manually searching through the file to determine the presence of all of the necessary documents.
Some file folders of the prior art include nomenclature on the outer file jacket or spaced lines whereupon the presence of a given document can be indicated as the document is placed within the file. However, this is time consuming in that these entries must be made. Additionally, the fact that an entry was made upon the outer portion of the file jacket does not, in and of itself, assure that the document is, indeed, within the file. Thus, again a manual search must be made of the file to be absolutely certain that the document is present.
In other prior art file folders, the file folder will have separate pockets within which a given document is to be placed but, here again, the absence or presence of the document within its respective pocket must be ascertained by opening the file and physically determining if the required document is within that particular pocket into which it is supposed to have been inserted.
What is desired in the industry is a multi-document file folder into which a plurality of specific documents may be filed and which file folder will permit immediate and instant recognition of the presence or absence of a particular document without the necessity of opening the file. The absence or presence of the document may be ascertained either visually or by the use of machine readable apparatus.
The multi-document file folder of the present invention overcomes the foregoing shortcomings of file folders of the prior art and achieves the required instantaneous recognition of the presence or absence of documents without the necessity of opening the file folder.